Zebit, Operated by Global Analytics, Raises $30M for U.S. Expansion

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As a Web-based financial services company, Global Analytics is not exactly a household name—even in San Diego, where the company was founded in 2003.

That seems likely to change in coming months, however. Global Analytics is announcing today it has raised $30 million in debt financing, as the company lays the groundwork to bring its micro-lending services to the U.S. market. While San Diego-based Global Analytics developed the underlying analytics technology, it provides short-term loans and other financial services to “underbanked” consumers through two online operating companies—Zebit and Lending Stream, which currently operate only in the United Kingdom.

Global Analytics may rank as the biggest unknown Web company in San Diego, but it hopes to reprise the success of Falcon Fraud Manager, the multi-factor analytic system created to assess the relative risk of credit card transactions in real time. Krishna Gopinathan, Global Analytics’ co-founder and COO, led the technical team that invented the Falcon system at HNC Software before the San Diego analytics company was acquired by Fair Isaac, the credit scoring powerhouse now known as FICO (NASDAQ: FICO).

“Falcon is the most successful product in the history of the payment system business,” says Global Analytics CEO Michael Thiemann. It is used to protect more than 2.5 billion credit cards worldwide, and Thiemann says he has a hard time thinking of anything else that is as widely distributed.

Thiemann also was an executive at HNC. He oversaw HNC Financial Solutions and came out of retirement to join Global Analytics in 2009, which coincided with the company’s first round of outside financing. With the $30 million announced today by Crystal Financial, Thiemann says Global Analytics has raised a total of $95 million ($50 million in equity funding and $45 million in debt) for its Zebit business. San Francisco’s Crosslink Capital has been Global Analytics’ key venture investor, along with Mohr Davidow Ventures, Leapfrog Ventures, QED Investors, and a number of private strategic advisors. The additional capital is expected to enable Global Analytics and its Zebit business (the two entities are basically the same) to grow at 50 percent through 2013 and 2014.

Gopinathan co-founded the company a decade ago with the idea of providing specialized analytics services for … Next Page »